Black female and children’s bodies in papers published in “Gazeta Médica da Bahia”

Abstract

In this text we will shed light on four experiences of illness in black, female and child bodies in the second half of the 19th century. These experiences, of two children and two working women, were taken from a significant set of cases involving enslaved and freed people, published in the medical journal Gazeta Médica da Bahia. It is interesting to underline the presence of black bodies in the practice of academic medicine, in the Imperial Northeast. The cases we present bring up scenarios of daily life in slavery and corroborate the historiography that points out the relationships between academic medicine and slavery during the 19th century.